Amidst several other advantages, one of the best things about WordPress is the freedom and ease of customization. Putting it in simple words, with WordPress, almost everything seems to be smooth sailing. And, the more you know about this platform, the easier it becomes to alter the website. These WordPress setting are your best spot to start.

So, those who didn’t have any clue about these common but effective WordPress settings here’s the checklist that will surely turn out to be valuable.

Resetting the Password:

When you install WordPress, you get a pre-set password that helps you get access to the dashboard of your site. However, such default passwords aren’t as strong as they should be. As a result, your website may become prone to hacker’s attack as these passwords are quite easy to guess.

And then, WordPress even provides an opportunity to use an auto-generated password. But, yet again, it can be much vulnerable to brute attacks. Therefore, without taking enough time, it’s recommended to reset the password to a strong one.
Setting up a password is an easy task with WordPress:

Log in to the dashboard

On the left side, click on the Users option

In the drop-down, you’ll find a submenu called Your Profile

Here, you get options to either generate a password or create your own. You can choose the one option that would keep your website safe and guarded. And then, click on Update.

Customizing General Settings:

Let’s begin the list with changing general settings. By customizing the basic default settings of your WordPress website, you can control its performance and operations effortlessly. To do so, you’d have to simply go to Settings and click on General Settings.
Once here, you’d be able to alter website title, tagline, date format, time zone, time format, and more. The moment you update all these settings as per your own preference, don’t forget to hit the Save button.

While working on these settings, you must keep the brand relevancy and target audience in mind. Since your site title and tagline are going to display in the search engine ranking, you must pay special attention to these aspects.

Cleaning the WordPress Dashboard:

Based on the method of WordPress installation, there might be some additional elements present on the dashboard. Generally, these extra goodies are unnecessary and may serve no purpose to you. Once you’ve gone through them and if you find them invaluable, you can simply remove them.

Most of these third-party plugins or free themes bundled up on the dashboard may impact the speed of your website. Moreover, some of them can be even default widgets that you may not want there.
To clean them up, follow these steps:

On the top of the WordPress dashboard, find Screen Options

Its drop-down menu will help you declutter your dashboard, making sure that you free up some space

This drop-down menu will provide you the access to different things that are available on your dashboard. From here, you can simply check all those things that you’d want to see on the dashboard and uncheck the ones that are of no use to you.

Setting up the Site Address:

Another important setting that you shouldn’t be avoiding is altering the address of your website. The reason why this address is of importance to your visitors is that it helps them discover your website without facing any hassles.

On top of that, the way you set up your website address may even impact your Google search engine ranking. Depending on what or how you want your website you look like, you can select from the two given options – http or www.
You can change this setting by typing in the required prefix in the WordPress Address Field. Furthermore, if you want, you can even change your homepage address URL to make it look different from the rest of the web pages.

On the top of your dashboard, you’ll find a notification to update your WordPress version. All you have to do is click on Please Update Now, and it will be done instantly.

Moreover, along with the update, it is even recommended to take the backup of the website. It will help you regain the control over the earlier settings if anything goes wrong with the site.

Deleting Unused Themes & Plugins:

Undeniably, there would be several elements that can slow down your website or may create problems with its functionality. Hence, it’s quite important to get rid of them as soon as possible. Out of all, two of them would be unused plugins and themes.
There is no denying the fact that WordPress provides an extensive list of themes and plugins.

However, it’s true that not each of them would be of use to you. As one of the considerable tasks to maintain the WordPress website, you should be deleting all the unnecessary themes and plugins.

However, while doing so, don’t mess around with the default theme or uninstall it. If something happens to the theme and it breaks down, your WordPress website will go back to its default version. Surely you wouldn’t want that, right? So, be cautious.

Setting up Permalinks:

Customizing permalinks holds importance as it lets you control the way your URLs appear out to be after publishing. Not just that, but customized permalinks, with required keywords, can even help you with search engine ranking as well. Hence, it’s recommended not to stick with the default setting.

To edit the permalinks, follow these steps:

Go to Settings and choose Permalinks Menu

You can choose anyone from the provided list

However, to gain SEO control, it’s recommended to select Custom Structure or Post Name

It is even crucial to be attentive while setting permalinks as one mistake may end up the entire page go 404.

Configuring the Image Size:

Although most of the WordPress users skip this part, however, if you’re going to use lots of images on your blog, configuring the image size is quite important. By default, while uploading pictures in WordPress, it provides you with three different size options.
Here, you can set up the image sizes like 0 x 0 and retain only one size as per your desire.

This will remain as a default setting in the Media section. However, whenever you are changing themes, these dimensions will change automatically.

Conclusion:

Once you’ve installed WordPress, customizing these settings will become quite easier. WordPress also provides free plugin options if you’d like to try your hands on them. Hence, ensure that you are researching well before installing to get the best out of them.
And, make these suggested changes to your WordPress website so as to make the navigation part easier for your visitors.

Sanjeev loves everything about WordPress. Always in constant search for new tools and Plugins keeps him hungry all the time. He spends his day brainstorming new ideas about new plugins and themes on WPeka and SlideDeck.